The Bug Burger

My final outing for the Wellington On A Plate Burger Wellington competition was my local, The Larder. They’d been offering two dégustations this year, Aussie Rules and Grubs Up, a mind-opening experience that does exactly what it says on the can of worms. Neatly crossing both these categories was The Bug Burger, a delicacy known to our Aussie chums as a Moreton Bay bug, and not an actual bug at all, but a small lobster.

They describe it like this:

Morton Bay Bug with fermented chilli, cucumber, capers and iceburg lettuce, with shoe string fries and lemon salt.

The Garage Project beer match is White Mischief. Interestingly, our waiter told us that Garage Project had instructed them to serve it in a wine glass, which they duly did. There was no such information last time I consumed this beer at The Lido.

It looked like this:

Now, as you may know, I have a bias towards The Larder, but even so I can’t award this burger full marks. I don’t wish to harp on about lettuce, and I’ll stop doing so as soon as everyone gets it right. If only they’d listen to me! The other issue is the one of burger real estate: when you’ve got all that bun to fill, you should fill it. Now, I appreciate that Moreton Bay bug is a premium ingredient and you’re only going to get one per burger at this price, so you should really downsize the bun to match. As it was, vast acres of bun were nothing but unfilled, and unfulfilling, breadiness. It was a nice bun – the sweetness of the brioche offset the crustacean beautifully – there was just too much of it. The shoestring fries were nice and crispy, and the aioli delicious. I eventually settled on 8 as the score for this burger.

So that’s my burgers for this year. Scopa and WBC joint favourites, but no 10s awarded this time around. I’ll look out to see who the judges think is the best.